Enterprise software systems receive, generate and store data related to many aspects of a business enterprise. Due to the volume of data, the variety of data, and the speed with which the data accumulates, intermediate systems are required to facilitate users' access to and understanding of the data.
These systems may provide reporting, planning and/or analysis of underlying data. In one example, a user requests a report showing sales per month for a particular sales region. In another example, a user requests a sales plan which is fully or partially-populated based on underlying data. Some systems allow a user to customize such a report or plan, as well as to generate a new report, plan, or other view.
Such customization or generation might not be intuitive to a typical business user. Even if a user is adept at creating new views, these views normally include measure values associated with various combinations of dimension members, and simple values calculated based on the measure values (e.g., totals, etc.). In order to include more sophisticated analysis of the underlying measure values, the user is typically required to author a query (e.g., MDX or SQL) of the underlying data source. The skill set of the typical business user does not include this capability.
Accordingly, systems are desired to facilitate the inclusion of useful analytical information within user-generated views.